LANDSCAPE CONCEPT: PROGRESS 02/03/2013

           Painting an environment challenges everything creatively - composition  perspective, lighting, scaling, colour etc. My normal methods to approach all the aforementioned are restricting, plus, everything just ends up looking too bold, too 2 dimensional and too cartoonish - crap. I had to rethink my approach to concept art as a whole and in result, it absolutely changed everything.

   Now, it inst even remotely finished yet, I'm still finding my feet, brainstorming ideas for lighting and colour pallets. But by challenging myself, my art seems to adopt a theme and dare I say it, character.  Normally, my work would use one lighting source, no complimentary colours, and always the same pallet - black and red. It was just boring!

I aim to leave my restricting comfort zone from now on. I want to;

• Stop being afraid of contrasting colours.
• Stop using white and black alone to light scenes.
• Develop my highlighting skills.
• Focus less on detail at the start of work. 

So, after looking at concept art and theory books to develop my understanding of concept art as a whole, I took my first step at applying it to my scene (below).

CAVERN ENVIRONMENT (BEFORE) - IN PROGRESS
by Christian Whelan

CAVERN ENVIRONMENT (AFTER) - IN PROGRESS
by Christian Whelan

   You can see the difference between the first image and the second. If I would of gone down my usual cartoon like route, It would of ended up looking like a blind baby drew it with crayons and glue.

    Like I said, vary early in it's development  The second red lighting source was just an attempt to get an idea of things, I'll rework that later. At the moment  I need to get in the basic lighting, then add highlights until finally, adding in the red light and refining the back drop. I'm actually exciting to see how this turns out.

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